The TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

The leading international forum for literary culture

February 26, 2013

Jewish life in modern Germany

By TOBY LICHTIG

In the aftermath of the Second World War, there were
some 250,000 Jews living in Germany, the vast majority "displaced
persons", housed in temporary camps. After the state of Israel was founded
in 1948, most emigrated, and the population quickly dwindled to one tenth of that amount.

But the small German Jewish community very gradually
grew, bolstered in the 1950s and '60s by a trickle of returnees and, following
the collapse of European Communism, an influx from the former Soviet Union.
Today, there are over 110,000 Jewish Germans, an estimate that more than doubles
if non-practising immigrants of Jewish origin – or with only Jewish fathers –
is taken into account. There is also a significant number of Israelis living in
the country – 18,000 in Berlin alone, according to a recent report. For many years now, Germany has had the fastest growing Jewish population in Europe.

The state of contemporary German Jewry was the subject that kicked off Jewish Book Week on Saturday night, in the form of a stimulating,
if sometimes circumlocutory, conversation between Olga Grjasnowa, a German
writer born in Azerbaijan, and Dr Rafael Seligmann, a history teacher, author
and founding editor of the Anglophone German newspaper Jewish Voice from Germany. Chairing the debate, entitled
"Dilemmas of Difference", was the filmmaker and broadcaster Tina
Mendelsohn.

Seligmann, whose German parents moved to Israel after
the war and returned to Germany in the 1950s when he was a boy, was pragmatic
about the reasons for the ex-Soviet influx, concluding that, "for 90 per
cent of them, it's to do with economics", rather than
ethnicity or spirituality – a statement that wasn't in any way designed to
downplay the importance of this community to Jewish cultural life. Seligmann
took an equally unflustered approach to the eternal question of Jewish
identity: "If he or she says 'I'm a Jew', they’re a Jew!"

A wry and playful debater, who celebrated the fact
that Germany now boasts a thriving society of "Jewish writers and Jewish
doctors and Jewish criminals", Seligmann argued that only in recent years
have German Jews begun to feel "German" once again. He also stuck up
for the new immigrants who, he claimed, continue to be marginalized within Germany,
as evidenced by their woeful underrepresentation on the German Jewish Central
Council (Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland).

Less convincing was Seligmann's contention that
"only in Israel" do Soviet Jews escape stigmatization as "not
proper Jews" – a prejudice born from the decades of suppression of Jewish
cultural life and religious practice under Soviet rule, and promulgated in Israel as much as anywhere else. Even if times are now changing, the Israeli assimilation story has been a fraught one.

Grjasnowa vigorously disagreed with
Seligmann on this point, drawing on her experience of living in Israel, during
which time she frequently felt pressured by the authorities to
"prove" her Jewish legitimacy. As so
often in contemporary debates about Jewish identity, Israel threatened to
monopolize the conversation, and, on at least one occasion, Mendelsohn was
forced to plead: "But let's talk about Germany!"

Anti-Semitism then became the focus of
debate, with Seligmann drawing upon two recent furores to underline the prejudice
that, both panellists felt, still bubbles below the surface in Germany. (Both were quick to underline their belief that this is no more or
less endemic to their country than any other European state.)

The first controversy was Günter Grass's 2012 poem "What Must Be
Said", which drew parallels between Iran's nuclear ambitions and Israel's
nuclear open secret – although neither commentator had much to say about the
subject, nor about the endlessly fraught question of where opposition to
Zionism (in its Likud-dominated, expansionist sense) ends and anti-Semitism
begins.

The second controversy was the recent (and swiftly
overturned) decision by a court in Cologne to ban circumcision, having equated
it with criminal bodily harm. Seligmann rightly drew attention to the platform
this debate provided for an outpouring of ill-informed xenophobia, a
"nasty discussion about foreigners and foreign practices" (the whole
thing was, he said, "an alibi for old prejudice"). What no-one on the
panel mentioned was that this court decision was made in the light of a
tragically botched circumcision on a young Muslim boy. There is a healthy
debate to be had about the rights and wrongs of circumcision, and it doesn't need to bring in either anti-Semitism or Islamophobia.

Sights then turned on the Holocaust. Mendelsohn claimed
that, "for Germans, the Shoah was a long time ago, for Jews it is
not"; and Seligmann pointed out the difficulties faced by the non-Jewish German post-Holocaust generation, arguing, provocatively, that "it is harder to
be the child of Cain than the child of Abel".

Where the evening, I thought, came up short was in its
appraisal of the positive stories about contemporary Jewish German life: the
very fact that there is now a newspaper called Jewish Voice from Germany. There was brief mention of a
"German-Jewish Renaissance", but little indication of what this might
comprise, and a dragging sense (from this small sample at least) that Germany's
horrific past remains inescapable.

My own late grandparents, who were Berlin refugees,
would have been interested to witness this debate, their conflicting personal
outlooks highlighting the ambivalent attitudes harboured towards Germany by
Jewish refugees of their generation. Following his escape in 1938, my
grandfather expressed no desire to return to Germany and affected an American
accent in a (futile) attempt to hide his Berlin drawl. My grandmother, who lived to see
the new millennium, felt German to the core, and, in the years after her
husband's death, made regular visits to her homeland with several of her German
emigrant friends.

There is a fine line between commemorating,
remembering, never forgetting and
being hamstrung by the weight of history. A quick browse of Jewish Voice from Germany gives an
indication of where we may be today. The newspaper, which is wide-ranging and
well-written, features stories on an array of contemporary issues – the
"flourishing" Jewish community, the circumcision debate, current
anti-Semitism, Israeli science, Turkish politics, Azerbaijani gas reserves,
Berlin fashion – and a slew of articles beginning with sentences such as, "Some eighty years ago"; "Before 1933"; "The
persecution and annihilation of German Jewry"; and, simply, "Auschwitz.".

It may be argued that the real sign of healing comes when the
impulse to look forwards outweighs the need to look back. We appear to be at
least part of the way there. Perhaps in another generation the balance will be tipped.